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Three Poems

I like lakes; I like not quite evading modern places: I like the armature of the moment E-shaped crowds spread in a lamplight filled bubble across a vast lawn high-pitchedly.

II.

The face of the sum of each day really is covered with bulbs blasting the tallest, roundest light towards flatnesses & I watch, waste, go away, carry clear bags holding liquids when they’re most inert, fondleable.

III.

I like ponds; I like shrillful strayings circling modern places: I like, like the plenitude of the days U-shaped crowds curl like faintly shriveled bubbles over the corners, the casings of steep lawns. Limbs rhyme.

For a Friend

I.

into will: was it dumb motion shrilled as such or simply will alone stripping itself down to a crude but more pure force—

II.

—silence congeals but conceal, here, the clatterings—

III.

will’s source: was it a crude but more pure force culled there- from or simply dumb motion shrilled yet sub- sumed—

The Lighthouse Verdict

Curtailed distance as a vague harangue. Binoculars: coverings, inducements. Shuttlings. Distance, pronounced: a discreetly hissing wound? The toy gyroscope is not rattling at the staircase’sBottom, nor does the shrill rattle down the steep staircase Reflect anything but passing foolery, a mind at low playPushing up but mostly just against its own boundaries. Binoculars: self-extension purely realized; or, bestEyes. A set. One. One set. Most of the instruments dusty & dark in the cabinets … And the cabinets kept, per design, at ten-foot Intervals throughout the lamp-cluttered, mustyUpper room. Twin rattles down the staircase: someone’s

Home? The loose breath of the straying mind: glass is fogged. A crowd pushes like something’s limb across the sand. The staircase, say it, staircase—one pair of arms? Of legs?There’s a system well imposed & upon—see it—the face.

Steve Barbaro is a former Henry Hoyns/ Poe-Faulkner fellow at the University of Virginia. His poems have appeared in the Conjunctions online magazine, in addition to such venues as The Journal, Caketrain, American Letters & Commentary, Fourteen Hills, and DIAGRAM.